Making Frozen Pizza

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Let’s face it. No one can resist craving pizza for more than a couple of days. And in fact, cosmonaut Yuri Usachov didn’t even make it while in orbit and received a pizza delivery through a rocket. Frozen pizza making process involves first creating the dough, allowing it to rise, and cutting it into the typical pizza shapes. After choosing sauces and toppings you prefer, you can let your pizzas cool in a spiral freezer.

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Frozen pizza forming

Frozen pizza cooling

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It’s pizza time – How to make frozen pizza

It’s been a while since Joseph Bucci filed the first official patent for frozen pizza and was trying to figure out how to get rid of the excess moisture coming from tomato sauce. Since then, the frozen pizza market has grown more and more to be valued at USD 19.6 billion in 2019. Pizza consists of a flattened bread dough traditionally topped with tomato sauce, mozzarella, and oregano. Flour, water, sugar, salt, yeast, and olive oil are mixed together and kneaded to create the dough.

The dough is then left to rise typically for 10-15 minutes at 25-40°C. After rising, a sheeting machine flattens the dough (1 inch thick). To prevent air pockets from forming in the dough, stainless steel spikes make small holes in the dough.

A roller with round shapes cuts the dough, creating the pizzas, and the leftover dough is mixed again with fresh dough. After baking the pizzas for 5 minutes at 180 to 280°C, you can add your favorite toppings and sauces. Now, cool the pizzas for about 25 minutes below 20 degrees in a spiral freezer. All that’s left is to apply a plastic wrap using an overwrapping machine and then an arm will place the pizza in the pizza box. Enjoy!

Can pizza be your favorite vegetable?

Of course, it can! Even the frozen pizza market is paying more attention to the demand of consumers who are increasingly looking for a plant-based diet. The first step was to find an alternative to animal-based toppings, swapping meat for plant-based meat or dairy products such as mozzarella or cheese for vegan cheese. But producers didn’t stop at the toppings. They went deeper, thinking of new ways to revolutionize the pizza crust itself.

So you start with cauliflower-based pizza crust, which has less sugar and more fiber than traditional pizza, and end with hemp seed pizza crust. Hemp is considered a superfood because it is a complete source of plant-based protein; plus it can provide you with the necessary fatty acids like Omega-3 and Omega-6 that your body cannot produce from scratch on its own.

Why does frozen pizza taste different from fresh pizza?

Well, we certainly can’t expect a frozen pizza to taste the same as freshly made pizza from a pizza maker in a restaurant. But over the years, many manufacturers have tried to get as close as possible to the flavor of fresh pizza, trying to improve the frozen pizza making process. In the international patent WO2003001917A1, the inventors explain some reasons why the two pizzas taste different and provide a method for creating a frozen pizza that is more like a fresh one.

For example, one reason they explain is a difference in oil used in the two processes. Fresh pizza is baked in a tray containing a much higher oil content than frozen pizza. This causes the fresh pizza to have a crispy and gold base that tastes better. In some manufacturing processes, the ball of dough is put into the pan and pressed into it as well. This means the pan can only be lightly oiled, not allowing the frozen pizza to develop the same texture as fresh pizza.